Philip Wylie - Tomorrow!

“Maybe she’s a moron.”

“She’s merely an orphan,” Nora replied. “I wish school didn’t last all summer, now. I bet I have to go clear through high school, this way. Just because so many schools got wrecked. I wish I could go to Europe on a student tour. Do you think Dad would ever let me?”

“Dad might, in a few more years. But would your fiancé?”

“Scum!” she said. “What’s Queenie doing?”

“I dunno. I haven’t asked him. Every pretty female in the block, doubtless.”

“I mean—over by the Baileys’—by the old summerhouse?”

Ted peered through the hedge and across the sunlit lawns. “Search me!” The cat was staring in the gazebo, through the lattice, standing on his hind legs. “A peeping Tom cat, I guess.”

“What a lowlife ,” she murmured fastidiously—and she went away, to see what Queenie was doing. She came back in less than a minute, running. “Ted! Ted! Oh, Mom! Ted, you were right! The Crandons’ angora is having kittens in there! His kittens, Queenie’s, I bet!”

“ Sans doute ,” he replied and rose, limping more than usual, as he followed her. Even Mrs. Conner came out and looked. There were three kittens on a forgotten pillow—three, thus far. The Crandons’ angora looked proud; Queenie looked appropriately suspicious, pleased, defiant and generally paternal.

“How dreamy!” Nora kept saying. “How perfectly dreamy!”

“Profane love,” her brother suggested, with a wise nod of the head.

“It is not! Cats don’t….”

“What on earth,” Mrs. Conner asked, “are you two fighting about?”

“Nora’s life interest of the moment,” Ted said, beating her to the reply, leaving his sister open-mouthed. “Something people for years have been calling sex.”

Beth chuckled. “You better get dressed. Your father will be along soon. And you still have to bathe, Ted.”

Henry Conner signed his mail, said good night to his secretary and went down two Rights of stairs to the ground floor of the West Side store of J. Morse and Company. The main building and the warehouses had, of course, vanished with the Bomb. They were using the West Side branch for business offices now and would go on doing so until the new Morse Building was finished. At present, it was a set of blueprints, the work of Charles Conner. Under the Emergency Building Code, they wouldn’t even lay the cornerstone for nearly another year.

He walked along the sales aisles, en joying, as always, the sights and smells of a hardware store-glitter of chrome, glass and steel-geometrical array of hand tools, garden tools, ornaments, plumbing fixtures, the splashes of color in the kitchenware section, the aroma of tar and rope and metal and machine oil.

The Oldsmobile was parked behind the store, near the loading area. It gave him an almost sentimental feeling: it would he good for quite a few more years. The old buggy had taken quite a beating, though. He looked in the trunk, to check, and drove away in the hot sunshine, aware that its hotness was diminishing, that there was a breeze. He was scheduled to pick up Charles first, then Pad Towson and Berry Black, then Lenore. Next week the car pool would be Towson’s lot.

Charles wasn’t waiting at their meeting place.

Henry was glad. He parked the Olds and got out. He looked for a while at the building where his elder son worked. The Green Prairie Professional Building had been the first one erected according to the new plan and the first one to invade the “total destruction” area. It wasn’t high, not a skyscraper, only four stories. But it was as tremendous as the Pentagon—that—was, in Washington-that-used-to-be. It was something like a ranch house, but blocks long, with many “L’s” and “courtyards” between them, with gardens, patios, glassed-in restaurants, even a skating rink in the courtyards.

Someday Green Prairie and River City would have a hundred such buildings all around the circle of ruins, and inside it, and here and there out to the suburbs besides.

“Semidecentralized,” they called it, and “horizontal expansion.” It replaced the vertical growth of the skyscraper age which had let fumed air, heat and darkness and slums accumulate in its canyons.

These buildings took more room, but as architects like Charles had argued—why not?

There was plenty of room for them in the prairies. They left plenty of room, too, room for broad streets with underpasses at intersections, room for vast parking areas, room for gardens, for parks, for picnic grounds right in the center of the city, room for swimming pools and dance floors and everything else that added to life’s enjoyment.

It had not been so difficult as many had expected to “sell” the once-crowded city dwellers on the new pattern for living. Most people had detested many aspects of urban living. And even those who clung to old ideas habitually were shaken in their conservatism. For nobody who had lived in a bombed city wanted to spend another hour, if he or she could help it, in such a deathtrap. To be sure, there was no menace, any longer, of bombs. But the memory that haunted millions slowly pervaded the whole population. Hence the new, “wide-open” cities satisfied unconscious fears, even in people who otherwise would have clung to the traditional-style city: to the narrow streets, the picket-fence skyline, the congestion, suffocation, gloom and noise.

Indeed, by this time, unhit cities were considered “obsolete.” Those that had been bombed provided people with a surge of exhilaration, for the bombing had proved an ultimate blessing by furnishing a brand-new chance to build a world brand-new—and infinitely better.

So Henry gazed at the structure where his son worked. Then he faced around, walked to a fence, and drank in the scene opposite.

The rough circularity of the destroyed area could be perceived from where he stood, though a man in the middle of that desolation could see the circle more plainly. Such a man could pivot three hundred and sixty degrees: everywhere the earth would sweep away, bare and comparatively Hat, to standing buildings (or ruins) approximately equidistant from his position.

Now, looking across from one edge, Henry drew a big breath and expelled it with force.

He never could get it through his head that something his living room could easily contain had removed the familiar cityscape, left it as nude as this. And all in a night, consuming in hours what had taken men generations to put there.

Now, in summer, weeds were growing out there. The red-brown nothing was relieved by sprawls of green. And the arid circle was bisected by the river. Its blue water could be seen, darker where the afternoon breeze ruffed it. On Swan Island, there was a tangled mound, a pimple on the earthen face, where the tracks of the roller coaster had been vaporized, leaving, nevertheless, sundry heaps and embankments that had supported other rides and contained the chute-the-chutes pond. That earth had not been boiled away, or wholly Battened.

Near the perimeters, in the river, he could see the rusting, rectilinear tops of collapsed bridges. These hadn’t been pulled clear yet, hadn’t been sent back to the smelters. And everywhere, making a din, sending up dust, machines worked. Like men on Mars, they lumbered in this desert, disinterring and reburying, with mammoth indifference to all meaning. If one watched a particular dozer or earth-mover, one would see the substance of archaeology, the potsherds of recent twentieth-century Americans. A refrigerator would be turned up, or a bathtub, or a kitchen stove or, perhaps, stone foundations, a brick wall. These would be pushed into shallows, crushed Hat, covered again—to make a firm base for the coming metropolis.